Integrating social media into your WordPress site is easy, and it has the potential to help you grow your audience. One of your readers really appreciates one of your posts, and he or she would love to share that content with their friends who may also find it helpful.

By integrating social media, you’re making it easy for your readers to spread the word within their social circle. Before you know it, their social circle has become a part of your ever-expanding audience. All you need to do is use the right tools, and your posts will practically promote themselves.

Use a Profile Widget

Profile widgets show your readers your social media profile. These occupy a lot of space, so you won’t want to crowd your website with them. Pick the social network you use the most (usually Facebook) and display it with the widget. Your readers will be able to follow you on the platform of your choosing, or like your Facebook page without having to leave the page. It’s a one-click connection that’s easy for anyone to make. No one will have to go out of their way to find you on social media.

Add Some Buttons

Some WordPress themes already incorporate the option to add social media buttons to your posts. All you have to do is copy and paste your URLs and enable these buttons. You can even configure these buttons to open links in a new tab, so they won’t redirect users away from your WordPress site. If your theme incorporates this feature, you’d be a fool not to use it. It’s easy, and anyone can do it. If it doesn’t, you can manually input buttons or find a plugin that will incorporate the buttons for you.

Share Plugins

One-click sharing is the ultimate convenience. Your readers won’t have to copy and paste a link onto the social media platform they want to use. They’ll click a button, get a popup, add some text to the top, and hit share. As long as you make it easy for them to spread the word on your behalf and provide content worth sharing, the content will practically move itself. There are many WordPress plugins that can place one-click sharing, and there’s no better way to grow your audience.

Autoposting Plugins

After you’ve posted content, you probably manually share all of that content on all of your social networks to inform your audience that you’ve added something new. Rather than following that process step by step, you can get an auto posting plugin. This plugin is designed to cross post all of your content to every social media platform of your choosing as soon as you publish it. It saves you time and informs your whole audience simultaneously.

Mobile Friendly Combo Plugins

If mobile loading times are an issue for your WordPress site, you may have some difficulty trying to find a way to incorporate social media without further delaying the loading times of your site. If this is the case, you may need something like the Social Media Feather plugin. This plugin incorporates sharing buttons and follow buttons, and it does so without any JavaScript. Removing the JavaScript from the equation will help your site respond faster from smartphone and tablets.

There’s a WordPress tool for everything, and all of these tools make it easy to connect your website to your social media platforms. All it takes is a few seconds to set things up, and you’ve put yourself on the main grid.

With a background in Marketing, Jane Bolto currently works as a Content Specialist at Nybizdb.com.

With everything that small business owners need to do and take care of, filing taxes can be an overwhelming and time-consuming process. Of course, the specific steps you should follow as a small business owner vary depending on the type of business you own, but there are some general tips that can help all small business owners survive the tax filing process without losing your sanity.

Keep organized records

It may seem like an insignificant step, but keeping your records organized throughout the year will help you when it comes time to file your taxes. You may opt for a filing cabinet, an electronic scanner that digitizes all of your receipts, invoices, and tax forms, or computer program and spreadsheet to track all of your transactions, but whatever system of organization you use should be consistent throughout the year. When you have all of your documents together, filling out forms becomes a much simpler process.

Know which forms you need to use

If you plan to do your taxes on your own, you must determine which IRS tax forms you need to use. Sole proprietors and sole owners of LLCs may use a Schedule C attachment to your personal income tax return for recording income and expenses. Corporations must use a separate corporate tax return with Form 1120. If you have hired independent contractors or if you have employees, you will need to take care of W-2 and 1099 forms (there’s software that can help you immensely).

There are various tax software programs you can use to assist you in filing your taxes and knowing which forms to use. Some programs also include document management systems for your records so that you have everything that you need for tax season in one program.

Don’t procrastinate

If you wait to file your taxes, you risk paying steep penalties. Knowing the deadlines for your tax filing dates and various forms is key. If you use a Schedule C, it will become part of your Federal 1040 form and will need to be filed by the typical April 15 deadline. However, if you will be filing Form 1120, you will need to file by March 15, in most cases. If you have not been organized and have not yet chosen a tax preparation software or professional tax preparer, you should consider filing a tax extension. Keep in mind that you still may be subject to penalty and interest charges even if you file and are granted a tax extension, so it’s best to file by your deadlines.

Consider filing your taxes online

Some small business owners think that filing tax forms online is a service only for larger businesses and corporations, but that isn’t the case. Most small businesses are eligible for the E-File system, which makes submitting taxes much faster and easier and reduces the amount of paperwork and hassle for business owners. Filing online is another way to be sure to meet tax deadlines.

Remember your deductions

For many small business owners, deductions are a financial godsend. If you have a home office, you should consider taking the home office deduction. To qualify, you need a dedicated space in the home that is used solely for the business. There are two ways to calculate the deduction – adding up utilities, rent, etc. and multiplying that sum by the percentage of your home that is your office space, or taking a deduction per square foot of office space – so it’s a good idea to calculate using both methods and determine which will save you more money.

Office equipment and supplies used throughout the year also count toward deductions as do some insurance costs, travel expenses, and entertaining expenses. Be sure to check with a professional tax preparer to maximize your deductions.

The tax filing process can be daunting for anyone, but it can be especially difficult for small business owners. If you follow these five tips, you should have an easier time this year than in years past.

Jason Scott is a personal trainer and caregiver to his elderly mom. He enjoys sharing his fitness knowledge on his website.

Since its creation 13 years ago, WordPress has become one of the most favored content managing systems. Hailed as a go-to platform for bloggers, startups, small businesses and even large corporations, WordPress has cemented its popularity due to cost efficiency and ease of use. At this moment, it’s being used by over 74 million websites worldwide, and that number is projected to rise to a 100 million in the next year or two. If you wish to find out more about what makes it so special, we’ve prepaid 10 reasons why WordPress is the best content management system out there.

1. It’s free and open source

One of the main reasons why startups and small businesses choose WordPress is that it’s very cost effective. The CMS itself is completely free and the only things that can cost you are the hosting package and the domain name. Not to mention that it’s open-source, which means that every part of its source code is open for developers to work on, improve and provide the users with the latest updates in functionality, as well as performance and security.

2. It’s easy to use

Another reason why WordPress has become so popular is due to its user-friendliness. The learning curve is very short, even for complete beginners, as it only requires a few clicks to install it. Even the manual installation is simple, all you need to do is extract it on your server and you’re ready to go. Creating and editing content is straightforward, even on smartphones. This is because using WordPress does not require any special coding skills and gives off the feeling of using a word processing program than it does anything else.

3. It offers a lot of functionality

As a content management system, WordPress easily handles all the behind-the-scenes work, such as indexing content, generating navigation links and making both the links and the content searchable. User management has always been tricky for webmasters. However, WordPress automates the user management tasks such as keeping track of specific permissions and keeping their data secure. There are also a number of different plugins available, which you can install literally with only a couple of clicks. Most of them are free, but there’s also many premium, paid plugins.

4. It’s SEO-friendly

Getting at the top of the search engine results page has become important now more than ever. Straight out of the box, WordPress offers numerous options used for search engine optimization. It can generate specific categories and tags for each post, allowing them to be cataloged by search engines more easily. Each page and each post can be given a specific meta tag and a keyword, allowing for a more precise optimization. Furthermore, there are tons of plugins developed specifically for search engine optimization, including the two most popular choices, WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO.

5. It’s easy to customize

WordPress offers a number of different customization options, ranging from fonts, colors, design and even some core theme features. This can be done either by applying a specific theme, using the dashboard that provides the users with a simple interface they can use to change most of the website elements or customizing directly by editing the code. There are a number of cheap premade themes available, but you can also hire a web designer to make a custom theme from scratch if you need to.

6. Excellent community and support

WordPress has an outstanding community of web developers and active users ready to help you with any problem or issue you might experience while using it. The support forum is well-maintained and contains over a million different queries you can search for solutions and troubleshoot any problems that may occur. Frequent updates allow for any bugs and issues to quickly be resolved so make sure you’re using the latest versions of both the plugins and themes and WordPress itself.

7. It’s flexible and versatile

Although it started as a blogging platform, WordPress has grown into a complete solution for any website requirements you might have. It can be fully customized and used to create almost any type of website you could image. Currently, it’s being used for:

Blogging

E-commerce

Appointment and service booking

Photography and Video

Hosting directories

Classified ad listings

Membership-oriented websites

Question and answer forums

Information repository

Almost all of these come as a part of a theme and as such require little-to-no work to set them up. All you have to do is fill it with content and it’s ready to use.

8. It’s very secure

You might think that because it’s open source, WordPress is more likely to be vulnerable to attacks, as hackers have a full access to its code. But this is simply not true, as security holes get quickly patched up with regular updates. One of the best ways a hacker could exploit your website is if it’s not updated to the latest version, so regular update checks can prove themselves to be a real life saver. Just make sure your themes and plugins are also up to date, as they are they pose the biggest security risk.

9. It’s mobile-friendly

More than half of all internet traffic is coming from a mobile device. Having a website that can be viewed on a host of different devices is slowly becoming a norm and WordPress is certainly not lagging behind this trend. Most of the available themes, if not all, are required to be mobile and tablet friendly, which means that WordPress organizes and resizes your content based on the size of the screen you’re viewing it from. This is especially important for optimization, as mobile-friendliness is one of the major keys of good SEO practices.

10. Excellent community

You will find an outstanding community of developers and active users who support WordPress as an open-source platform. There are many different aspects of WordPress web design handled by dedicated and talented coders, developers and testers from around the world. You can use the community forum to ask for help for all sorts of problems and issues that might occur, or search through millions of available queries and answered requests. No matter what issue you might have, there’s always someone there to help you resolve it in no time.

WordPress isn’t the only content management system available at this moment. There’s Drupal, loved for its high levels of security and Joomla, which can be customized like no other. However, neither of them is as simple or as easy-to-use as WordPress is. Not to mention that both of them combined don’t have nearly as many themes and plugins WordPress does. On top of that, the community behind it is one of the best and the friendliest community online, ready to answer any question or help you resolve any issue you might have.

Author bio: John Stone is a web entrepreneur and SEO Consultant. Through years of experience, he became a devout believer in the notion that form should always follow function and that developing the ability to think outside of the box is a prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur. He currently advises companies about Web Design in Sydney. You can find him on Twitter.

If you’re a blogger or your career is in any way connected to blogging, there’s a pretty big chance that you’ve heard of WordPress. In fact, we’d say that it’s almost impossible that you haven’t; WordPress is hands-down the most used blogging platform today, and chances are that your favorite blog or website is using WordPress as well. It’s very efficient, very easy to use, and most of the time, very secure.

The keyword here is “most of the time”, and if blogs are your livelihood, most of the time just doesn’t cut it. WordPress does have somevulnerabilities that are potentially a reason for concern, although the dev team is pretty active in patching those vulnerabilities with updates. To be completely certain that your website’s security won’t be compromised, though, it might be a good idea to grab some third-party plugins to enhance your security. So without further ado, here are five of the best plugins for this purpose, in our personal opinion.

1. iThemes Security

This plugin does a lot of things to keep your website secure at the same time: it tracks the activity of registered users, scans malware extensively, offers a password expiration feature and more. iThemes Security will periodically scan your whole website and will warn you if there’s any obvious vulnerability or weak point, and will protect you from brute-force attacks by automatically banning all IP addresses that it catches trying to brute force your account. The development team has announced that they’re even implementing a GeoIP banning feature in the future. And finally, this plugin is also equipped with Google reCAPTCHA in order to prevent excessive spamming, which means that your comment section will remain as clean as it can be without you having to remove the spam yourself.

2.WordFence

Definitely one of the most popular plugins for security nowadays. Once installed, WordFence will check your website for any traces of a malware infection by searching the core files, the plugins and even the theme. The moment that an infection of any kind is detected, WordFence will notify you. The development team proudly claims that their plugin can make your website up to 50 times more secure than before.

WordFence protects you against brute-force attempts and offers SMS authentication, which is much harder to crack unless you let other people touch your phone on a regular basis. It detects any malicious code that could be present in comments or your post itself, and will instantly notify you by e-mail if anything suspicious is detected.

3. Sucuri Security

Another great plugin to use if you’re concerned about your website’s security. Sucuri offers a variety of ways to keep your WordPress blog safe such as file integrity monitoring, scanning for malware and firewalling. It has built-in DDoS protection as well as brute-force protection, and will keep a detailed log of all activity on the website, letting you know exactly what’s going on.

These logs are even backed up to their cloud server, so in the event that anything serious happens, you can still access your logs remotely. If you really want to go all the way, Sucuri also features a premium service for added protection, technical support and security advice from experts as well as a multitude of other benefits.

4. VaultPress

Backups are the number one way to keep your data safe these days, no doubt about it. Any serious blogger or entrepreneur will backup their data daily, lest they want to risk losing everything in the event of a DDoS or something of the sort.

With VaultPress, not only do you get security scans and technical support but also regular automatic backups to their secure servers, so you don’t have to worry about losing your data ever again. In the event that a hack does happen, their team will be on it in a moment and your website will be restored as soon as possible. They’ll also help you out with identifying potential security flaws and threats that led to the attack in the first place.

5. All In One WP Security & Firewall

This popular WordPress plugin secures your website by utilizing a multitude of security measures. One of them is brute-force lockdown, which means that, in the event that someone tries to brute-force your password, the plugin will lock the entire site down and take it offline. All In One WP Security actually forces you to use a strong password even if you don’t want to, because that is honestly the best way to keep hackers at bay.

The plugin also monitors user activity and logs IP addresses, the date and time of logins and other information that’s potentially valuable in the event of a security breach.

Summary

Hopefully now that you know about these plugins, you can utilize them to properly increase the security of your website. Internet security is not a joke these days, and you can lose everything if you’re not careful enough.

Please note, however, that while your website might be secure now, you should secure your connection as well. Never browse without HTTPS while you’re working, and you’d be smart to set yourself up with a VPN subscription as well (we highly recommend that you install a VPN like ExpressVPN). Coupled with the plugins that we’ve already told you about, these extra security measures will make sure that no unfortunate accidents will happen to your website.

Adam Ferraresi is a successful web developer from Dallas, Texas and one of the writers of wefollowtech.com. He is twenty three years old, and when he isn’t working on some interesting new article, he enjoys listening to music and watching old movies.

Your Website Management Team

Rachel Pfanz and Emily Journey lead the WP Artisans team. They enjoy helping business owners leverage technology to increase sales and social impact.

What People Are Saying

WP Artisans has managed our website for 3 years and at least 80% of our business has come from the website they developed and manage for us. We’ve tried print, radio and online ads, but nothing compares to a website that is functional, well designed, and at the top of the list. WP Artisans knows how to do this and the web site is the single biggest reason we have grown from 3 planes to six planes in just two years."

Pat Rooney, Owner, Sundowner Aviation

Emily Journey and WP Artisans are not only the "Real Deal" when it comes to website management and SEO but are also incredibly knowledgeable, experts in what they do and good people! They completely redid our two websites www.ezshelf.com and www.brillseat.com. We previously tried numerous other firms some from India, others with an office here and work done in Eastern Europe, and others - our website prior to WP Artisans was a hodge-podge of hard coding, and over 39 plugins. It was impossible for us to maintain the websites by ourselves and SEO was like a secret language only our previous consultants knew. Emily and WP Artisans are committed to removing the curtain hiding the "Wizard of Oz" and to empowering individuals and companies to take back their website and marketing.

David Jablow, Founding Partner, EZShelf and BrillSeat

Emily manages my real estate website and is a great person to work with! She is always quick to respond to maintenance requests and she goes above and beyond so my website ensures the success of my business. I highly recommend her services!

Adam Knolls, Real Estate Broker, RE/MAX Revealty

Emily does a terrific job managing our Capital List web site! Not only does she provide extraordinary service but she also does a great job on coaching you about how to improve traffic. We've had several web sites over the years and Emily has been the very best person to work with on this vital part of our business.

This website is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc., The WordPress Foundation, or the WordPress Open Source Project.

In the spirit of full disclosure, some of the links on my site are affiliate links, which means that I may get a small commission if you decide to purchase anything from recommended companies. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.